Average beach, Micnoacàn, at sundown. Fred, dissolute as a matter of principle, supervises waves with a cold Tecate. To get here, you drive north from Ajijic to Guadalajara, turn left until you hit the Pacific coast at Manzanillo, turn left again, and find hundreds, perhaps thousands or millions, of miles of deserted beaches. We stay in a little town with one hotel of four rooms, one of them a suite, of about two stars, with chickens cackling in the yard and no gringos, cackling or otherwise. And eat garlic shrimp in a restaurant whose floor is the beach, with a leaky thatch roof and usually no customers. Maybe there is a God.

Our friend Maria Elena, a full-blooded Taca from Oaxaca who sits by day fifty feet to the right of Pablo’s restaurant, El Jardin, as you face it, on the plaza of Ajijic.